About this project

Avorion - Journey to the Center of the Galaxy

€16,725

pledged of €15,000 goal

497

backers

Hi, my name is Konstantin. I began working on Avorion four years ago, as a hobby alongside my studies at university. It all started with a small idea: I was annoyed that in most space games at the time, when you fight and destroy a large carrier, it would always explode the same way. If you shoot the engines, why don't the engines blow off?

My favorite games at the time were the X games and Minecraft. With those games in mind I decided to make my own space sandbox game with engines that can blow off!

To stem the large amount of design work that was required for the project, I decided to procedurally generate the space ships and stations that you find in the game, so I made the ships up of blocks. I wanted something different than the standard voxel look, so the blocks in Avorion can be scaled to any form and size. Basically, boxes and voxels. Boxels? I quickly realized that boxel ships have another great benefit, aside from generating them: Players can build them themselves!

The development of the game worked out great over the last four years, I've released several smaller demos to get feedback and in December 2015 I thought to myself "Ah, screw it, I'll try it!". I made a trailer, put the game on Steam Greenlight and BAM it was greenlit in only 9 days!

After this positive feedback I decided to go all-in and no longer develop the game as a hobby only. My times as a student will be over soon and I want to make Avorion my job. I asked Philipp, a university friend, if he wanted to join me, and he was excited to do this together.

This means that now, Philipp and I, we want to develop Avorion full-time so we can make it live up to its full potential. For that, we will need your help, because our private funds are starting to run low.

Avorion is a procedurally generated sci-fi sandbox where you start the game at the edge of the galaxy and must find your way to its core.

While you can build your own ships, Avorion focuses on actually flying around in your ship, exploring and fighting. Think of your ship more as a character in an RPG, not just a vehicle.

The galaxy gets more hostile, but also more rewarding the closer you get to its core.

Avorion is about you. It's designed so that you can play in your personal way, as a mercenary, freighter captain, admiral, scavenger or pirate. You decide!

Avorion is already very far in development. Konstantin developed the game for four years next to our studies at university. Nearly everything you will see on the next few pages is already in the game.

The game is pretty far in development already, and you can try it out here if you don't believe us yet:

Demo Features:

The complete Building Mode (but not all blocks)

Creative Mode

Combat and NPC pirate attacks

Multiplayer

Chainguns, Lasers and Mining Lasers

The Super Action Mode

Trading

Mining

Please note that this demo is meant to only be a general demonstration for the game. It is stripped of some content (some of which was simply unfinished at the time) and only the starter area is accessible to players.

A Focus on Combat

What separates Avorion from the other dozens of space building games? Avorion focuses on combat and actually using your ship, not just building it. There's going to be a lot of exploration, quests, combat, space warfare and boss fights.

You can equip your ship with chainguns, lasers and other weapons to take on your enemies. Defend your allies from pirates, hunt down enemies for coin or even participate in wars between entire factions. You can hire captains to fly your ships for you and build your own fleet. Destroy enemy freighters to steal their cargo and gather loot to augment your fleet.

Procedural Generation

Space ships, stations and sectors in the game are procedurally generated. While exploring the galaxy you will be travelling among beautiful nebulas and dense asteroid fields encountering many factions that populate and control their portion of the map. Each faction has its own characteristic style, so their ships and stations have a distinct look.

Build the Space Ship of your Dreams

There are no limits to size or complexity besides your resources. But be sure to keep an eye on your ship’s stats like maneuverability and energy requirements. Use different shapes and colors to get exactly what you desire. Install system upgrades that cater to your style of play, for example mining systems that guide you to valuable asteroids rich of ore.

Economy & Trade

Extend your ship with a cargo bay, find profitable deals and haul over a hundred trading goods through the galaxy to make a profit and buy your way up the food chain: Build up a trading corporation and found asteroid mines and factories that attract NPC traders who will buy and sell their goods at your establishments.

Multiplayer

You don't have to fight the galaxy alone! We want to make sure that you can play with your friends. Avorion features co-op multiplayer, so team up to build stations together, destroy pirates and enemy factions, or meet your pals in large PvP battles! Or maybe you just want to demonstrate that, should you crash into each other, your ship is way more stable...

Day 1 Modding

What would a sandbox game be without modding? We believe that it is essential for sandbox games that they offer mod support for more options and long-term fun. That means that Avorion will be featuring day 1 mod-support.

We're using lua as a scripting language, and we will make a lot of the lua game code open.

Follow your Personal Playstyle

To us, one of the most important aspects of Avorion is that you're free to play in every way you want.

Be a mercenary and work for hire to protect convoys or eradicate groups of outlaws

Explore the galaxy and scavenge asteroid fields or abandoned wreckages for precious loot

Be a miner, equip your ship with powerful mining lasers and gather resources from asteroid fields

As a merchant, find the best routes for trade and haul goods between factories, or even smuggle illegal wares

Raid other freighters, steal their goods and sell them on the black market

Build your own stations, found mines on large asteroids to gather valuable goods that can be bought by NPC traders or other players

As the admiral of your own fleet you can command your ships and wage wars against entire factions

Mining

Mine asteroids to collect resources to build your first ship out of 7 building materials with different tiers from Iron over Titanium up to Avorion, a new mysterious resource that has been discovered lately in the center of the galaxy. Resources can either be sold for profit or used to build your ships. Each material has its own strengths and weaknesses, and with rising material tier you will unlock more blocks to attach to your ship, like shield generators or cloak generators.

Explore the Galaxy

Once you've built your first ship, it's time to go and explore the galaxy. Each ship is equipped with hyperspace drive, which will let you jump to any nearby sector in a limited range. There's also the already established gate-network, set into place by the civilised factions. Discover new sectors, factions, space anomalies, resource-rich asteroid fields and trading routes.

Get Ready for Space Warfare

We said there was a focus on combat right? You can equip your ship with 10 different kinds turrets (and counting). All weapons have distinct properties. For example use rocket launchers to fight your enemies from a distance or plasma cannons to break through even the strongest shields. Defend yourself against pirates or be the aggressor that starts wars between entire factions!

When defeating your foes, they will drop loot that you can use to upgrade your ship, such as new turrets, resources, trading goods or system upgrades.

Build Awesome Ships in Minutes

We want you to be able to spend your time exploring the galaxy, not slaving over a pile of blocks just to get it to fly. You're not bound to the standard voxel style and building an awesome ship in Avorion will not be as micro-intensive as in some other games. We want to make sure you can focus on building a great looking ship, without having too much trouble to make it work.

However, several behaviors of your ship, like speed or rotational speed, depend directly on the blocks and the materials they're made of. Thrusters work better when they're built far away from the center of mass of a ship, and the less mass a ship has, the better its acceleration. You will also have to make sure your ships meet other requirements, such as crew space or energy needs.

But, if you're not the building type of player, then you can let Avorion generate a ship for you.

Trading

There are over a hundred different trading goods in Avorion, each with their own production scheme and factory. You will be able to equip your ships with cargo bay blocks, which will provide space for transporting cargo.

You can even upgrade your ship with trading systems, which will contact local stations and retrieve prices of trading goods. More advanced trading systems will even be able to detect profitable trading routes between multiple sectors.

Dynamic Events

Sandboxes can get boring over time. We want to make sure that won't happen in Avorion. Avorion will feature dynamic events, which will be happening at random times. You might get attacked by pirates while you're mining, or receive a distress signal by a convoy which is under attack or that has a reactor leak. Some of these events will be of a larger scale, such as an enemy faction invading your territory or that of an ally.

Journey to the Center of the Galaxy

Strange things are happening in the galaxy; Sub-space rifts are tearing apart the very matter of time and space, and it's your mission to find out what's causing it. The nearer you get to the core, the more hostile and rewarding the galaxy will become. This story will be a driving factor for players, so that you have background motivation to get to the center of the galaxy, where you can find the high-tier weapons and materials.

So get your ship (or fleet) ready and prepare yourself for the dangers you will have to face and the treasures you will find!

What's already done

Did we mention that nearly everything you've seen so far is already in the game? If not: Most of the things you've seen so far are already implemented!

The game has been developed as a hobby alongside university over the last 4 years. This is what we've got so far:

Procedurally generated Galaxy, including a million sectors per galaxy, planets, ships, stations, asteroids, weapons and factions

Combat with completely destructible ships and stations

Working Multiplayer with dedicated servers

Extensive Building Mode for ships and stations. The building mode features many comfort functions like mirrored building, block merging, copy pasting ships or parts and co-op building

10 Different Weapon Types (and growing)

14 Different Ship Upgrade Types (and growing)

45 Different Block Types (and growing)

Modding: Sectors, stations, pirate attacks, NPC traders, all those things are implemented with the same API that will be available to modders

Windows and Linux support

There are a lot more features than that, but those are the biggest and most important ones for now.

What's still to come

Loose, Arcade-like story leading the player to the galaxy core, including

Boss Fights,

Random Events and

Side Quests.

Integration of the Steam API

Fleshing out the gameplay and adding more depth and life to the game

More kinds of stations, NPCs, enemies, weapons, blocks, upgrades

We have a very long list of features that we want in the game, but these are the ones with the highest priority.

Greenlit on Steam

Avorion has been Greenlit by the Steam community in only 9 days and will be available through Steam. A big thank you to everyone who voted yes!

This means that the distribution platform for Avorion will be Steam. We will be sending out Steam keys as backer rewards and you will need a working Steam account to play the game. The early kickstarter beta will also be organized through Steam.

20.000€ - Mac Support: Basically, the only things keeping us from doing a mac version is time and hardware. With your funds, we'll be able to get the hardware necessary for mac development and the time to concentrate on porting the game to this platform.

25.000€ - Official Online Servers: We will provide official Avorion servers hosted and administrated by us for the community, from the beginning and in addition to the players' servers.

40.000€ - Very detailed, long story quest: Instead of being only a driving factor for players to get to the galaxy's center, the story will be very detailed and feature multiple characters with their own personalities. We will hire an experienced writer in order to get this right, since Philipp and Konstantin will be busy implementing the rest of the game.

65.000€- Truly Infinite Stations: While we're optimizing Avorion's ship and station sizes all the time, at some point you simply reach the maximum capacity of your hardware. With this goal, we will implement streaming and extensive level-of-detail optimizations so you can build truly infinite stations.

If these stretch goals aren't met, then their implementation won't be completely discarded, but it will depend on the sales that the game will generate. If they're met, we will guarantee that they will be implemented, but some of them won't make it in before the Early Access release. We do want all of the above features in the game, however, some of them cost too much time, so it won't be possible for us to implement them immediately.

We won't be listing all the rewards here a second time, but instead clarify some details about several rewards.

T-Shirts

T-Shirts will be shipped world-wide and shipping costs are already included in the pledge.

Procedural Generation And Designed Rewards

The backer-designed rewards will be generated with a certain probability. Let's take a station that was designed by you: When the game generates a new station, it will be doing a dice roll. Then, with a certain probability, it will either generate a station the default way, or it will choose a station at random from the list of stations that were designed by backers. The same goes for naming and other things like ships and wreckages.

We will make sure that your designed ships and stations won't be just one of some dozen in a sector. You designed a ship, you want it to be seen, right? Your ships and stations will fill more special roles: They may participate in events and have more meaning than just being the 5th factory in a sector. Backer designed wreckages will be scavengeable and filled with valuable loot.

Delivery dates are for the respective sub-rewards. We will get in touch with you in May for the design rewards. For the ship/wreckage/station rewards we will be sending out an editor for you, similar to the in-game building mode where you can design your unique craft.

We will be doing a Kickstarter Early Beta for everyone who got the corresponding backer reward. This Early Beta will be starting a few weeks before the Early Access Release on Steam in August.

Your Feedback shapes the game!

You'll be able to play Avorion before everyone else and at the same time help us a great deal finding bugs and polishing it. We will listen closely to any feedback you guys will have for us. We hope you'll enjoy it!

Since we recently got greenlit on Steam, the distribution platform will be Steam. We will be sending out Steam keys to everybody who got the backer reward and you will need a Steam account to join the Beta.

You may be wondering "If there are already so many features, why the kickstarter?"

Right now the game is in a state where we have a lot of features, but not that much content. If you're a tinkerer that likes to try out and mess around with stuff, you might already have a blast playing the game. On the other hand, there is nothing that's really driving the gameplay, and if you want a lead on what to do next, or you prefer experiencing things like a story, quests or mission goals, well... there isn't that much there yet.

So basically, we have the underlying structure of the game done, and now we want to take it to the next level and add more actual content to it, like quests, a basic storyline, dynamic events happening, boss fights and the like. The game is not yet in a state where the majority of players would be able to enjoy it the way we want it to be enjoyed.

Getting the game to a closed-to-finished-state where we're comfortable with releasing it in Early Access will easily take a few months. We have to cover our expenses for the months to come, and those we already had for founding-a-company-related costs, hosting the website or getting assets for the game. Since we want to make this project a full-time job, we need your help.

Currently, this budget schedule is an estimation and may be subject to change.

April, May 2016: Kickstarter Campaign

May 2016: Implementation of the design rewards with the backers

July 2016: Kickstarter Beta

August 2016: Steam Early Access Release

End 2016: Full Release

After Release: Since the project has grown dear to us, if all goes well after the full release and sales are enough to sustain us, we will continue developing the game and release regular updates.

As of right now, we're two guys who will be bringing you Avorion: Konstantin Kronfeldner (koonschi) and Philipp Erhardt (Qui_Sum). We're also working closely with our composer, Hannes Kretzer, who will be writing the music for Avorion.

Konstantin, Philipp and Hannes

We (Konstantin and Philipp) got to know each other 5 years ago when we were doing the same graphics project at university. We immediately clicked and since then worked together at several different projects. Two years after the start of the development Konstantin met Hannes, who turned out to be an excellent ambient music composer. They both realized the wonderful opportunity here and decided that Hannes was the perfect fit for Avorion's music composer.

This is our first commercial project and the first game for the newly founded studio Boxelware. Avorion has grown very dear to us and we've already sacrificed a lot to get this project on the road. We're very excited and passionate about Avorion and we will be doing our very best to deliver you guys a great game!

Konstantin Kronfeldner is the lead programmer and game designer of Avorion. His focus will be designing the new content that's about to come, such as the events, missions, weapons, blocks, enemies or bosses, for example.

Philipp Erhardt is the engine programmer for Avorion. He takes over what was started by Konstantin: Performance, graphics, user interface, game engine and the server backend, to name a few of his responsibilities.

Hannes Kretzer is the composer for Avorion's music. He is established in the ambient music scene for years with several releases and worldwide collaborations. When he first heard about Avorion he immediately had a certain sound scenery in mind. The soundtrack seems infinite, finding repetitions is a rare pleasure.

System Requirements

These system requirements are based on the current state of the game and will most likely change in the future. We're doing our best to make sure the game runs on as many machines as possible, but due to the internal structure of the game you will need a processor with at least 2 cores. The more, the better.

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Windows or Ubuntu Linux

Processor: Core 2 Duo with 2 Cores

Memory: 3 GB

GPU: OpenGL 3.0 Support, 1 GB

Latest Graphics Drivers

Minimum Resolution: 1024x768

500MB Disk Space

Recommended:

Operating System: Windows or Ubuntu Linux

Processor: A CPU with 4 (or more) cores

Memory: 6 GB

GPU: OpenGL 3.0 Support, 2 GB

Latest Graphics Drivers

Minimum Resolution: 1024x768

800+ MB Disk Space

Keep In Touch

We will be checking the comment section as often as we can to answer your questions. If you want to keep in touch via other media, check out these links:

Thank you

Thank you for showing interest in Avorion. If we managed to interest you in the game, please consider backing us and spread the word about Avorion.

A very special thank you goes to Jonas Kraus who helped us make the video for the kickstarter campaign, and all our friends and families who have been motivating and supporting us.

Risks and challenges

Developing a game of such large scale is a huge undertaking. In order to deliver you a great experience, we want to focus on developing this game full time.

Our biggest strength is that there are a lot of things that have already been implemented. We are confident that, with the help of your funding, we'll be able to first push the game to Early Access, and then have enough money to continue working on Avorion and finish it.

Avorion has been developed steadily over the past years. Over that time the game has grown dear to us and we're having a lot of fun coding it. That means we want to continue developing it and release updates regularly even after the main release.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge €25 or more
About $29

CORVETTE TIER

Early Bird: Get the game a few weeks before the rest!

+ All rewards from the Fighter Tier
+ Steam Key for the Kickstarter Early Beta (see description for more details)
+ You will appear in the special thanks in the web credits (if you want that)
+ Your forum badge will be a "Corvette" badge

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge €500 or more
About $571

+ All rewards from the Captain Tier
+ You design an entire sector with us that will be generated in the game. That includes what NPC stations and ships will appear, as well as asteroids, containers, gates or enemies. This sector will be named after you.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge €750 or more
About $856

+ All rewards from the Captain Tier
+ You design a system upgrade (including code if you're code-savvy) with us that players can use to upgrade their ships. This system upgrade will be named after you.